With respect to the prior work on service hosting, the key novelty of this work is the option to partially host the service at the edge. We say that a service is partially hosted when a fraction of the database and code of the service is hosted at the edge. The partially hosted service can be used to compute parts of the answers to user queries and deliver to the user with low latency. The rest of the answer is computed and delivered from the cloud at higher latency. Partial hosting requires lower edge resources than completely hosting the service at the edge and therefore can potentially lead to a reduction in the cost incurred for renting edge resources. To understand the potential benefits of partial hosting for existing services, we use a GPS trajectory dataset [1]}, [2]}, [3]} collected as a part of the Geolife Project by Microsoft Research Asia to characterize the fraction of requests that can be served at the edge as a function of the fraction of the service hosted at the edge. The details of this dataset and our inferences from it are discussed in the simulations section.
